Subj : Re: what's classic now?
To   : Richard Falken
From : Dan Cross
Date : Fri Jul 02 2021 01:41 pm

On 01 Jul 2021 at 06:13p, Richard Falken pondered and said...
 
 RF>   Re: Re: what's classic now?
 RF>   By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 03:01 am
 RF>  > That doesn't sound right to me.  Rogue began life on a VAX
 RF>  > running BSD Unix, not 6th Edition.  Adventure almost certainly
 RF>  > made an appearance on the PDP-11 pretty early on, perhaps in
 RF>  > the Research days, but rogue would have come later; after all,
 RF>  > it uses curses.
 RF> 
 RF> I sourced that information from the Early Roguelike Gallery. John Elwin
 RF> is trying very hard to keep a living museum of early rogue(likes) so if
 RF> you have a valid source for that claim, he will LOVE to hear about it
 RF> and make the necessary corrections.

Well, the original authors were Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy,
with some input from Ken Arnold.  Arnold wrote the curses
library that they built Rogue on top of at Berkeley.  Rogue is
from 1980, 6th Edition Unix was '74 (tapes went out in '75),
7th Ed was '78 (tapes distributed outside of Bell Labs in '79),
and 32V (Unix ported to run on the VAX) later in '79.  Joy
and Baboglu did virtual memory support in 3.0 BSD (before
TCP/IP!) towards the end of '79.  Ken Arnold wrote curses while
at Berkeley, where he was a student from '79 to '83.  The
earliest reference to curses that I can find is from 2.79BSD,
which is April 1980, though there are claims that there was
a paper written in 1977; I'm not sure I buy that, though, as I
can't find a good source for that time frame.  In the original
curses paper from 2.79, Arnold gives credit to Bill Joy for
what is obviously termcap, which was done for `vi`.  So I
think it's safe to assume that the work that went into curses
was probably done ~1979.

2.79 also includes a document from Michael Toy describing
rogue; Glenn Wichman has a history document describing the
history of `rogue` here:
http://www.digital-eel.com/deep/A_Brief_History_of_Rogue.htm
Note the references to starting with curses; so whenever
Rogue was written, it post-dates curses, and a lot of
contemporary accounts put it in 1980: 6th Ed was long in
the tooth by then.

I found a site called "rlgallery.org" which is a "Roguelike
Gallery" and has some history notes that claim development
in 1981 through 1983, but with no citations save some really
sketchy link to a gamesutra article.  I can't find any references
to 6th Edition beyond the rlgallery.org notes, but that doesn't
make a lot of sense to me, as I said before: if that early
work were done on a PDP-11, I imagine it would have been running
2BSD (any college in the UC system could have gotten the tape).

So yeah. I'm not buying that it was originally written for 6th
Ed.  That just doesn't make a lot of sense.
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